Diana – the saga goes on and on..… Almost ten years after the fatal crash and the Diana industry still trundles along. In addition to her birthday concert(1) we are promised a slew of books(2)and a plethora of films and documentaries.(3) The main event, though, is sure to be the long-delayed but much anticipated inquest, … Read more
Christopher Mayhew I.B. Tauris, London, 1998, (hb) £25. Christopher Mayhew died recently thinking he set up the Information Research Department. As I have shown elsewhere, he was thoroughly manipulated by the Foreign Office – just like his boss at the time, Ernest Bevin, come to that. This short (142 pages) book contains 47 pages of … Read more
Robert Parry Arlington (VA): The Media Consortium, 2004; $22.95 (US); p/b Order from <www.secrecyandprivilege.com> This is the book I have enjoyed most since the last Lobster and it is one of the best books I have read on American politics and parapolitics. Robert Parry really is very good indeed: he has the serious investigative … Read more
David Stirling: the authorised biography of the creator of the SAS Alan Hoe Little, Brown and Co, London 1992, £17.50 As the subtitle suggests, most of this book is taken up with the story of the foundation of the SAS. I didn’t read that section. I read the last third which contains lengthy accounts of … Read more
Just War: Psychology and Terrorism ed. Ron Roberts Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 2007, £20.00, p/b This is a curious collection in which a group of psychologists, with one exception all employed in higher education, try to get to grips with and form a response to the current Anglo-American ‘war on terror’. The responses vary. Two … Read more
Robert Parry, The Media Consortium, Arlington, Virginia, USA, 1999 $19.95 (US) $25.00 (Europe) ISBN 1-893517-00-4 Another important book from Parry, author of Trick or Treason about the so-called October Surprise. Parry has two major themes here. The first is the contra-cocaine story which he tried to research as it broke in the 1980s while … Read more
A Steamshovel Press Reader Edited by Kenn Thomas Illuminet Press 1995 Available in the UK from AK Distribution at £17.95(1) This is the first twelve issues of Steamshovel Press plus issue 13, which never appeared in magazine format. I like Steamshovel – I’ve written a couple of pieces for more recent issues – and I … Read more
Kenneth De Courcy Kenneth de Courcy buffs will be pleased to know that they can now visit a website with some interesting further information about this maverick figure. The site can be found at < http:// www.pharo.com/intelligence >, and is run by the team which produced Double Standards, last year’s interesting study of the Hess … Read more
Hitler’s spy chief: the Wilhelm Canaris mystery Richard Bassett London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2005, £20 This is a full and very well researched biography of one of the great enigmatic figures of the spy world in the 30s and 40s. The author, former foreign correspondent of The Times in Berlin and Prague, provides … Read more
I was born in a working class area of Leeds in September 1919. My parents were Quaker-ILPers and it was natural for me to gravitate to the labour movement. In 1934 I left school and joined the South Leeds Labour Party. The Labour League of Youth of the pre-war period had been heavily infiltrated by … Read more
